this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Perhaps the greatest scam the rich ever pulled off was convincing the common people that climate change is somehow our fault instead of theirs. A single billionaire harms the earth an order of magnitude more in a single year than most small towns will in a decade
But if you and your family stop using plastic straws, turn the heat down in winter, meticulously sort all your recycling and use public transport more for the next decade, you can help Jeff Bezos offset the emissions for his next weekend trip to the Maldives!
Something inside me just died.
Oof
Well yea. If every person reduced their impact by a tonne, that's 65 tonnes of CO2 saved
How many private jets is that?
Woah there, not everyone!
We can't expect the wealthy jet owners to participate, we are trying to offset their carbon usage after all, it wouldn't be fair if they had to do it as well..
In other words, if all the billionaires just ceased to exist, it would result in the humanity achieving the emission goals?
I mean, that's not strictly necessary either. Chinal allows a good many billionaires to exist, but they are hitting their emissions targets ahead of schedule, cause they don't let the billionaires run the entire show like they do in the USA.
"How to Cook Forty Humans"
It's not either the rich or the poor, it's all humanity, and that's not the rich saying, it's the IPCC. Now the rich (countries) of course have more means to lead the change and their guilt is much higher when they don't.
Source needed!
Well for example, I read the other day that 1 in 10 flights taking off from the UK are private jets.
That’s very interesting.
Majority of private jets carrying 3 passengers or less, releasing 10 times as much carbon per passenger than a commercial flight.
As a peasant, I don't think reducing my carbon footprint will offset the disgusting (increasing) display of greed from the elites.
Hahahahhaha
That’s funny and made me chuckle but it doesn’t substantiate the claim made.
I was being incredibly conservative and generous to the billionaires, considering the carbon footprint of just 125 of them is bigger than the entire nation of France
Well sort of. The source says it’s from their investments, not from their lifestyle.
Unless people have made an active choice to move their savings into an ESG pot, this will be true for everyone, just scaled according to the size of the pot.
Sort of an important mention, yes, but also sort of skewed.
As the article points out 50%-70% of their emissions are due to their investments, meaning those 125 billionaires still have more direct emissions of the size of up to half the country of france.
And I don't think its fair to equate having some little money in the bank, with employing brokers to ensure the exploitation of human labour and planetary resources enables you and your children to live in luxury without ever having to work
The difference is living off of what you work for and needing a bank account vs living off of your capital (meaning other peoples labour)
But the “little money in the bank” is in aggregate making a huge contribution.
So it’s easy to find the people who we want to blame big. But in aggregate we all have a role to play. That’s a harder message to swallow.